Lucio Fontana received important stimulus for his art from Futurism, an artistic formation that came about in Italy before the First World War. True to its name, it celebrated the ‘beauty’ of speed. Umberto Boccioni, the leading representative of Futurism, was the only ‘creative genius’ that Fontana was prepared to acknowledge.
In the 1910s the Parisian artists Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine were breaking new ground in the sculptural portrayal of space and bodies. Fontana knew their work, and was able to take up their concepts when developing his ideas of spatial art from 1946 onward. The radicality of his approach can clearly be seen in his bronze Scultura spaziale (Spatial Sculpture), from 1947.
